Child's Play

Chapter 8

It had been a strange day for Wield. Guilt and happiness had boxed for possession of his mind. During the morning, happiness had established a points lead. Cliff had been content to sit around the flat, drinking coffee, listening to a pop channel on the radio, chatting about nothing in particular. Wield had sat and watched and listened and understood his loneliness in recent years, and felt it as a personal reproach.

Guilt began to fight back in the afternoon as the boy grew restless and sullen and said he was tired of being cooped up, and couldn’t they go out? Wield said that he’d rung in sick, something he’d only done a couple of times ever and never when it wasn’t true, and he couldn’t go wandering off. Someone might ring, or he might be seen. But there was no reason why Cliff shouldn’t go out if he wanted to.

To his disappointment the boy accepted with alacrity, and for an hour or more it was Wield’s turn to feel restless, but when Sharman returned about five o’clock, he was so lively and affectionate that the sergeant’s insurgent misgivings were soon soothed away. They ended up in bed again. At half past six the youth rose and said he would sort out their evening meal. This evidently involved another trip out of the flat as Wield heard the door open and shut. He lay for another quarter of an hour, then got up himself and decided to have a bath.

He’d been in it long enough to start worrying once again when there was the sound of the flat door and shortly afterwards, Sharman’s voice calling that dinner would be on the table in five minutes, so would he get a move on?

Wield took his time, discovering in himself a reluctance to be bossed around in his own apartment. When he entered the living-room wrapped in the towelling robe which Cliff had borrowed on his first night here, he saw the table set with a Chinese takeaway feast. It was not food he cared for very much, but he forced an appreciative smile. There was, however, in the air a smell additional to the rich odours of oil and spices and soy sauce. He looked at the boy, sitting crosslegged on the floor with an easy grace and an expression of fatuous self-congratulation. He was smoking and it wasn’t tobacco.

Before Wield could speak, the doorbell rang.

He answered it without considering possible consequences as it delayed the saying of whatever he was going to say to Sharman.

‘Sick call,’ said Pascoe. ‘Oh hell, have I got you out of bed?’

This seemed the obvious interpretation of the robe. Then through the open door of the living-room he glimpsed the food-laden table.

‘Oh good. You’re eating anyway,’ he said. ‘How goes it?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Wield. ‘Thanks. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

Pascoe, all primed with reasons for not coming in and sitting down, was curiously put out by the lack of any attempt to urge him to do so. He felt a childish compulsion to delay his departure with uncharacteristic gabble.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘That’ll be great. We’re up to our necks as usual. This Italian corpse is turning out to be really interesting. And if that’s not enough, Mr Watmough has finally flipped. Watch your aftershave when you come back! He’s decided we’re all Gay Gordons in CID and he’s determined to sniff us out!’

He sniffed stagily in demonstration.

And again, not at all stagily.

Wield said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Some nonsense of the DCC’s. You know how they get these ideas and with the selection board coming up, he’s terrified in case anything happens to rock his boat. Look, Wieldy, I’ll not keep you from your dinner. It smells very … exotic. So take care. See you in the morning, I hope.’

Pascoe left, running down the stairs. His mind was running too. With Wield in his bathrobe, who was responsible for the presumably takeaway Chinese feast?

And for how long had marijuana been an ingredient of Chinese cuisine?

He shook the questions out of his head and concentrated on getting across his own threshold before his pork chop came out to meet him.

Wield re-entered his living-room.

‘One of your mates?’ inquired Cliff. ‘Why’d you not invite him in?’

Wield stepped forward, tore the joint out of his fingers and hurled it into the fireplace. He’d seen Pascoe’s expression and was suddenly filled with fear for the future.

‘You don’t smoke shit here,’ he said.

‘No? Why the hell not? Afraid of being raided, are you?’

Wield ignored this.

‘Last night,’ he said. ‘You said something about trying to turn me into a news story.’

‘Did I? Bad news, from the way you’re acting now,’ said the boy negligently.

‘Tell me again, what exactly did you say when you rang the paper?’

‘Why? What’s so important? Last night you said it didn’t matter. What’s changed?’

Nothing. Except that in Pascoe’s heedless quip about Gay Gordons he’d seen how what he felt as potentially tragic would be trivialized in the macho world of the police force. If Pascoe thought gay cops were comic, how would a monster like Dalziel respond? And why was the DCC interested?

He was feeling the onset of panic, and knowing it didn’t help control it. Once, with Maurice’s strength allied to his own, it had seemed possible to face, and outface, the world. But the moment had passed, and Maurice’s strength had proved delusory, and this child before him did not even offer the illusion of strong support.

‘Tell me again,’ he urged. ‘I need to know.’

‘Why? Why do you need to know? Don’t you trust me?’ demanded Sharman, beginning to grow angry.

Wield drew in a deep breath. He didn’t want another row. Or perhaps he did.

He said quietly, ‘I just need to know. There’s evidently been something said down at the station, and I’d like to be quite sure what it is, that’s all.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ mimicked the boy. ‘So you can make up your mind how to play it, is that it? So you can decide whether to go on being a fucking hypocrite all your life? I’ll tell you what your trouble is, shall I, Mac? You’ve lived so long with straight pigs that you’ve started to think like them. You actually believe they’re right and there really is something nasty and funny about gays. You know you can’t help being one, but you wish you could, like a man who’s got piles can’t help it, but wishes he hadn’t.’

The youth paused as if afraid of Wield’s reaction to what he’d said. Perhaps if Wield had kept quiet too there might have been a chance of a truce, a fragile calm settling into a firmer peace. But too much control for too long takes its toll of a man as much as any other excess.

‘So that’s my trouble, is it?’ said Wield with soft savagery. ‘And what’s your trouble then, Cliff? Mebbe it’s what I thought from the start. Mebbe you’re nothing more than a nasty little crook who came up here to put the black on me, then got scared. Mebbe all that stuff about your long lost dad is a load of crap. Mebbe Maurice got you right when he said you were a thief and a tart …’

The boy jumped up, his face working with rage and pain.

‘All right!’ he screamed. ‘And Mo was right about you too! He said you were a bloody loonie who wanted everything his way, no one else’s! He said you were fucking pathetic and you are! Look at yourself, Mac. You’re dead, did you know that? From the neck up and down. Dead. What do you know? — I’ve screwed with a dead pig! They should stick you on a platter with an orange in your mouth!’

He stopped, appalled at where his rage had taken him.

‘You’d better go,’ said Wield. ‘Quickly.’

‘What? No charges, no threats?’ said Sharman, with a poor effort at jauntiness.

‘You’re a liar, a cheat, a thief. What should I threaten you with? Just get out of my sight.’

Cliff Sharman went to the door, glanced back once, said something inaudible, and left.

Wield stood quite still by the table looking down at the array of congealing dishes. There was a voice high in his skull screaming at him to drag the tablecloth off and bring the feast crashing to the floor. He ignored it. Control was everything. He took three deep breaths, letting the steady surf-like rhythms of his breathing drown out that strident, insistent voice.

He paused.

Silence.

Then the voice screamed again with an intensity that vibrated the whole arch of his skull and he seized the cloth and with one spasmodic pull he hurled the Chinese feast across the room to trickle down the opposing wall like blood and guts from a belly wound.

He went through to the bedroom and stared at himself in the mirror, aghast. Once he had hated the way he looked. Then for many years, the years of control and disguise, he had thought of his face as a blessing, a mask ready made for a man who thought he needed a mask.

Now he hated it once more.

He threw aside his bathrobe, dragged on his clothes and minutes later went out in the cidrous gold of the autumn evening.

A farm labourer found Cliff Sharman’s body early the next morning. It lay in a shallow grave no deeper than the scrape of a hare’s form, beneath an old hedge of blackthorn and hawthorn and alder, bound round with ivy and jewelled with pearly dog-rose. Some hand, either of the killer or the night wind, had strewn the childishly young face with the first dead leaves of the season, but when the labourer’s fingers brushed them aside, the bright colours seemed to remain to stain the bruised and torn features. More terrible still was the gaudy T-shirt across which ran the unmistakable tread of the tyre which had crushed the boy’s chest.

From a high tree the voice of a telltale blackbird sang out its bubbly warning. The labourer rose and looked where best to go for help. Over the hedge about a quarter of a mile distant, he could see a roof and chimneys sailing ship-like through the morning mist.

Pushing his way through the hedgerow, the man began to trot at a steady pace towards Troy House.